Objectives

LIRICS addresses the needs of today's information and communication society
where globalisation and localization necessitate multilingual communication
creating an increasing need for new standardization as well as urgent recognition
of existing de facto standards and their transformation into 'de jure' International
Standards. LIRICS thus aims to:

Facilitate the implementation of these standards
for end-users by providing an open-source implementation
platform, related web services and test suites building
on legacy formats, tools and data;

Gain full industry support and input to the standards
development via the Industry Advisory group and demonstration
workshops

Provide a pay-per-use business model for use by Industry
and in particular SMEs validated during the project
for the benefit of all actors in the content and language
industries

Description of the work

The LIRICS Consortium brings together leading experts
in the field of NLP and related standards development
via participation in ISO committee and National Standardisation
committees. The Consortium has strong Industry support
and involvement through the 21 members of the LIRICS Industry
Advisory Group.

The standards development work in LIRICS will start
from an analysis of existing and emerging formats for
the standards in the project scope. From this analysis
the partners will then define and propose metamodels and
data categories for lexica, morpho-syntactic annotation,
syntactic annotation and semantic content following closely
the procedures established by ISO with which the partners
are already familiar, as well as an on-line environment
for accessing and maintaining data categories.

The deliverables will be direct inputs to the ISO committee
ballots. A quality assurance procedure within the project
by partners on the ISO committee will ensure acceptance
of the proposed standards at ISO level.

For these standards to have impact LIRICS will ensure
their usability by both

The implementation platform and the web services offered
will be the basis for the LIRICS exploitation plan enabling
a new pay-per-use business model for language technology
actors.

All these activities will be supported via a strong
dissemination activity targeting end-users of LIRICS standards
at demonstration workshops and a specific training session
on NLP standards for partners of eContent projects.

Milestones and expected results

LIRICS will deliver a portfolio of standards for ratification
by ISO including:

a metamodel for lexical representation;

metamodels and data categories for morpho-syntactic
and syntactic annotation;

reference data categories for semantic annotation;

test suites in nine European languages;

an open-source implementation platform, compatible
with major legacy systems and tools;

LIRICS will increase awareness of language engineering standards
and promote their take-up on a European scale.